PI On A Hot Tin Roof

office.”
    “I’m glad your leg’s better,” she said when they’d repotted.
    He realized he’d forgotten to limp. “The exercise musta done me good. So whatcha sayin’ is, maybe he never made that call. And if he never made that call, he wasn’t planning to come to the marina.”
    “But maybe somebody was bringing him. What was left of him.”
    “Yeah.” Eddie was taking it in. “Ya sayin’ he coulda been killed somewhere else. Well, first thing’s to call the night watchman and ax him what he thinks.”
    “May I do the honors? I’ve got his number programmed into my cell phone.”
    Of course she did. “Which ya just happen to have in ya pocket. Sure. Give him a holler.” The only surprise was that she hadn’t already done it.
    She pulled out the phone and pressed a button, not even dialing. One day he was going to have to figure out how to do that. “Hey, Wesley. It’s Talba Wallis.”
    And then, “Great, thanks. How’re you?” Her manners were improving. “And how’s Mary Ann?” Better still. Eddie’d probably have asked about the garden next, but he’d have bet his last dollar she wasn’t going to.
    “Listen, I was wondering something,” she said. “Can you think back to that voicemail you got from Buddy? Yeah, that’s right. The night he died. Was there anything strange about it? Uh-huh. Garbled. You mean you couldn’t understand the words? Uh-huh. I see. Was the intonation strange? Ah. Yes. Okay, thanks a lot, I really appreciate it. Can you tell me again what he said?”
    She made a writing motion, and Eddie put a pen in her hand. She wrote as she repeated the words. “‘Hey, buddy, this is Buddy—I’m heading out there right now for a meeting and there’s no need to stick around. You can go ahead and go home.’ He didn’t use your name? You sure about that?”
    Eddie waited a while longer. “What?” he said when she rang off.
    “There was static and background noise and the words seemed kind of halting—like maybe Buddy was drunk—but he wasn’t slurring, more like he just wasn’t paying attention. Then I asked that question about intonation and he said that was right—I mean, that was one thing that was wrong. Wesley hadn’t thought of it before, but it just sounded kind of odd. I didn’t press him—I didn’t want to put ideas in his head. But no question, something was funny about it.”
    “So what’s ya theory?” He was sure she had one.
    “Well, maybe a family member killed him and Kristin suspects that. Maybe that’s why she hired me. Listen, if this happened, it couldn’t have been a stranger. It had to be someone with access to Buddy’s voice, and someone who knew when Wesley went on rounds. That kind of narrows it down, don’t you think?”
    “I’ll grant ya the first, but I don’t know about the second. Maybe they were already at the marina with a cell phone, and they just watched till he was gone. And then phoned.”
    She thought about it. “Okay, yeah. That could have happened. But they had to know Wesley’d be there in the first place.”
    He shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “But they didn’t use his name—maybe they just saw him. Still, ya got a point. But it’s been awhile since then. How do we know Wesley remembered the message right?”
    “I asked him about that. He said he has a fantastic memory for things like that, and anyhow, he’s been over it a million times with the police, much closer to the time it happened. He’s pretty sure he’s not off by more than a word or two—and knowing Wesley, I’d trust him on that.”
    “If ya say so—sounds like a pretty smart guy. So if somebody did it, then who? Did Suzanne have a motive?”
    “To kill Buddy? I saw him hit on her once. Maybe he went too far and they had a fight, and they…oh, you know.”
    “Or maybe Royce found out and
he
fought with Big Daddy.”
    “Big Daddy. That’s funny—that’s my nickname for him. Okay. But either way, what about Suzanne? Why kill her?”
    “Two possible motives. Revenge or to keep her quiet.”
    “Mmm.” She chewed a fingernail, one of her most annoying habits. “I never quite buy revenge unless it’s the mob.”
    “Well, ya do have a mob connection goin’”
    The right side of her mouth went up in rejection. “Too far removed. But I’ll tell you one thing. That tape thing would have taken time and patience. And brains. The only two in this outfit who seem to me to have brains enough to do something like that are